Many people are familiar with the Clinton administration’s efforts to give then-Russian president Boris Yeltsin a much-needed — and decisive — boost in the country’s 1996 presidential election. Fewer are aware that from 1991 to 1996, US political operatives, funded by the federal government and directed by an influential senator, played an active role in bringing Mongolia’s right-wing opposition to power, a move that would prove as much a disaster to ordinary Mongolians as it would a boon to US government and corporate interests. The incident is so little-remembered today, it’s not even listed in Carnegie Mellon University political scientist Don Levin’s otherwise exhaustive list of superpower meddling in foreign elections. [...]
Strategists sent by the IRI to Mongolia taught the parties about membership recruitment, campaign messaging, and grassroots party building. At the start of 1996, they convinced the opposition to form a united coalition — the Democratic Union Coalition (DUC) — and advised the candidates to personally tour their message around the country, routine practice in most Western democracies but a new concept in Mongolia at the time. [...]
It’s doubtful all this could’ve happened without the large sums of US taxpayer money being lavished on the coalition. According to the NED’s annual reports at the time, between 1992 and 1996 it gave a total of $480,520 to the IRI for expressly partisan purposes — to help the free market opposition “develop strategies to make them a more effective force within the legislature,” and to help them “solidify their platforms and develop comprehensive and viable communications strategies for the parliamentary elections.”
To put that into perspective, the total cost of Mongolia’s 2000 parliamentary elections was $333,000. In 1996 alone, the NED gave the IRI $158,327 to assist the coalition in that year’s election, nearly half that total. [...]
But the damage was already done. Driven partly by a collapse in world copper prices, the economy quickly fell apart after the DUC’s victory. Unemployment ballooned over 20 percent, helped along by the purging of government departments and the decline of domestic industries. Close to four hundred children were estimated as living permanently on the streets. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization determined that one-third of the population was below nutritional-starvation levels. Even the founding chairman of one of the parties in the DUC admitted that average real incomes had dropped by 30 percent in the year they were in power.
No comments:
Post a Comment